Wed. 9 Feb. 2011

GUARDIAN Syria to set Facebook status to unbanned in gesture to

people………………………………………………………..1 UN on the road to Damascus ………………………………...2

NEW AMERICAN FOUNDATION Robert Fisk: Week 3, day 16, and with every passing hour,

the regime digs in deeper…………………………………....4

AL JAZEERA America an enemy of democracy …………………………....7

WASHINGTON POST Humility on the Nile ………………………………………..11

NYTIMES Allies Press U.S. to Go Slow on Egypt ….…………………14 Editorial: Mr. Suleiman’s Empty Promises ………………..18

BIKYA MASR Open letter to President Obama as Egyptians herald a new

dawn ……………………………………………………….19

HAARETZ Our revolution …………………………………………..….21

JERUSALEM POST Return to negotiations now ………………………………..24

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HOME PAGESyria to set Facebook status to unbanned in gesture to people President Bashar al-Assad promises elections and press freedom after seeing groundswell of protest across Arab worldLauren Williams in Damascus,Guardian,8 Feb. 2011,

Syrian authorities are to lift a five-year ban on Facebook in a move seen as an apparent "appeasement" measure, aimed at staving off unrest in the country following recent political developments in Egypt and Tunisia.

In a rare and candid interview, President Bashar al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal last week that he would push through political reforms this year aimed at initiating municipal elections, granting more power to non-governmental organisations and establishing a new media law.

The surprise move follows a failed "day of anger" protest in the Syrian capital, Damascus, last Friday and Saturday.

Crackdowns on internet freedom and fear of retribution following the recent arrest of protesters staging a solidarity vigil for Egypt was largely blamed for the lack of participation. Others pointed to widespread support for Assad, claiming calls for demonstrations were largely being co-ordinated by minority opposition groups from outside the country.

Officially banned in Syria, Facebook and other forbidden social networking sites such as YouTube are popular across the country and used by Syrians using international proxy servers to bypass firewalls.

"We are all using it anyway – so I don't see what difference it makes," said one Facebook user, Ahmad.

No official announcement is expected to be made on the decision – as was the case when the original ban first came into place.

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The news was broken by Haykal Media, publishers of Forward Magazine, online via Twitter.

Mazen Darwish, from the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, said the move was positive and reflected a new trust in the Syrian people.

"This is great news," he said. "After what happened on the 4th and the 5th, the authorities now know that the Syrian people are not the enemy. We are not stupid and we know how to use these sites with intelligence."

He said he hoped the decision was also indicative of a "new mentality" in the country.

"This is not just about Facebook, this is about a change in the mentality that the population needs somehow to be controlled. Things are changing. I hope this is the first step in a broader reform programme."

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UN on the road to Damascus Leader, Guardian,8 Feb. 2011,

It is heartening to hear that Syria is now prepared to cooperate fully with the United Nations investigation into the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri. That must mean that President Bashar al-Assad is putting duty before family, since one of the men the UN badly wants to interview is his own brother-in-law, the powerful head of military intelligence. The other five are colleagues allegedly implicated in the Beirut killing.

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There is no doubt that Mr Assad has been in a bind since the UN security council voted unanimously to require Syria to cooperate or face punishment. (Russia and China refused to threaten economic sanctions). Damascus has denied playing any role in the St Valentine's Day murder (20 other people also died) but was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon by international pressure and a "Beirut spring" of demonstrations against the 29-year status quo. This has emboldened the US and Israel. But the UN diplomacy was co-sponsored by France and has achieved remarkable consensus so this is not, as some imply, a re-run of the moves that preceded the US-led war in Iraq. It also reflects disappointment at dashed hopes for reform after the death of the president's feared and formidable father, Hafez al-Assad in 1999.

American neocons, who have long had Damascus in their sights, may have hoped to use the Hariri affair to bring about regime change on the cheap. US forces in Iraq have problems with "foreign fighters" crossing the border from Syria. Israel's beef is with Hizbullah in south Lebanon. They and others find it useful to have a weak regime in Damascus. But the best effect could be to embolden opposition groups which have seen a brief thaw give way to renewed repression. The Syrian government's scaremongering line is that only it is tough enough to keep Islamists at bay, playing on the pragmatic view abroad that it is better to stick to the devil you know. No one, however, wants to see Syria descending into Iraqi-style mayhem, or a repeat of the Muslim uprising that was so brutally crushed in Hama in 1982.

With the UN investigation due to be completed next month it would be wrong for President Assad to pledge cooperation and then play for time, as Libya's Muamar Gadafy did for so long over the Lockerbie bombings. Wider agendas should be resisted, but justice must be pursued and those suspected of crimes be freely questioned by the UN team and if necessary sacked - even at the price of a rift in Syria's first family. No government should be allowed to shield murderers in its midst.

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Robert Fisk: Week 3, day 16, and with every passing hour, the regime digs in deeperOur writer sees Cairo's protesters rally again in Tahrir SquareIndependent,9 Feb. 2011

Blood turns brown with age. Revolutions do not. Vile rags now hang in a corner of the square, the last clothes worn by the martyrs of Tahrir: a doctor, a lawyer among them, a young woman, their pictures strewn above the crowds, the fabric of the T-shirts and trousers stained the colour of mud. But yesterday, the people honoured their dead in their tens of thousands for the largest protest march ever against President Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship, a sweating, pushing, shouting, weeping, joyful people, impatient, fearful that the world may forget their courage and their sacrifice. It took three hours to force our way into the square, two hours to plunge through a sea of human bodies to leave. High above us, a ghastly photomontage flapped in the wind: Hosni Mubarak's head superimposed upon the terrible picture of Saddam Hussein with a noose round his neck.

Uprisings don't follow timetables. And Mubarak will search for some revenge for yesterday's renewed explosion of anger and frustration at his 30-year rule. For two days, his new back-to-work government had tried to portray Egypt as a nation slipping back into its old, autocratic torpor. Gas stations open, a series of obligatory traffic jams, banks handing out money – albeit in suitably small amounts – shops gingerly doing business, ministers sitting to attention on state television as the man who would remain king for another five months lectured them on the need to bring order out of chaos – his only stated reason for hanging grimly to power.

But Issam Etman proved him wrong. Shoved and battered by the thousands around him, he carried his five-year- old daughter Hadiga on his shoulders. "I am here for my daughter," he shouted above the protest. "It is for her freedom that I want Mubarak to go. I am not poor. I run a transport company and a gas station.

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Everything is shut now and I'm suffering, but I don't care. I am paying my staff from my own pocket. This is about freedom. Anything is worth that." And all the while, the little girl sat on Issam Etman's shoulders and stared at the epic crowds in wonderment; no Harry Potter extravaganza would match this.

Many of the protesters – so many were flocking to the square yesterday evening that the protest site had overflowed onto the Nile river bridges and the other squares of central Cairo – had come for the first time. The soldiers of Egypt's Third Army must have been outnumbered 40,000 to one and they sat meekly on their tanks and armoured personnel carriers, smiling nervously as old men and youths and young women sat around their tank tracks, sleeping on the armour, heads on the great steel wheels; a military force turned to impotence by an army of dissent. Many said they had come because they were frightened; because they feared the world was losing interest in their struggle, because Mubarak had not yet left his palace, because the crowds had grown smaller in recent days, because some of the camera crews had left for other tragedies and other dictatorships, because the smell of betrayal was in the air. If the Republic of Tahrir dries up, then the national awakening is over. But yesterday proved that the revolution is alive.

Its mistake was to underestimate the ability of the regime to live too, to survive, to turn on its tormentors, to switch off the cameras and harass the only voice of these people – the journalists – and to persuade those old enemies of revolution, the "moderates" whom the West loves, to debase their only demand. What is five more months if the old man goes in September? Even Amr Moussa, most respected of the crowds' favourite Egyptians, turns out to want the old boy to carry on to the end. And woeful, in truth, is the political understanding of this innocent but often untutored mass.

Regimes grow iron roots. When the Syrians left Lebanon in 2005, the Lebanese thought that it was enough to lop off the head, to get the soldiers and the intelligence officers out of their country. But I remember the astonishment with which we all discovered the

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depth of Syria's talons. They lay deep in the earth of Lebanon, to the very bedrock. The assassinations went on. And so, too, it is in Egypt. The Ministry of Interior thugs, the state security police, the dictator who gives them their orders, are still in operation – and if one head should roll, there will be other heads to be pasted onto the familiar portrait to send those cruel men back into the streets.

There are some in Egypt – I met one last night, a friend of mine – who are wealthy and genuinely support the democracy movement and want Mubarak to go but are fearful that if he steps now from his palace, the military will be able to impose their own emergency laws before a single reform has been discussed. "I want to get reforms in place before the man leaves," my friend said. "If he goes now, the new leader will be under no obligation to carry out reforms. These should be agreed to now and done quickly – it's the legislature, the judiciary, the constitutional changes, the presidential terms that matter. As soon as Mubarak leaves, the men with brass on their shoulders will say: 'It's over – go home!' And then we'll have a five-year military council. So let the old man stay till September."

But it's easy to accuse the hundreds of thousands of democracy protestors of naivety, of simple-mindedness, of over-reliance on the Internet and Facebook. Indeed, there is growing evidence that "virtual reality" became reality for the young of Egypt, that they came to believe in the screen rather than the street – and that when they took to the streets, they were deeply shocked by the state violence and the regime's continued, brutal, physical strength. Yet for people to taste this new freedom is overwhelming. How can a people who have lived under dictatorship for so long plan their revolution? We in the West forget this. We are so institutionalized that everything in our future is programmed. Egypt is a thunderstorm without direction, an inundation of popular expression which does not fit neatly into our revolutionary history books or our political meteorology.

All revolutions have their "martyrs", and the faces of Ahmed Bassiouni and young Sally Zahrani and Moahmoud Mohamed

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Hassan float on billboards around the square, along with pictures of dreadfully mutilated heads with the one word "unidentified" printed beside them with appalling finality. If the crowds abandon Tahrir now, these dead will also have been betrayed. And if we really believe the regime-or-chaos theory which still grips Washington and London and Paris, the secular, democratic, civilized nature of this great protest will also be betrayed. The deadly Stalinism of the massive Mugamma government offices, the tattered green flag of the pathetic Arab League headquarters, the military-guarded pile of the Egyptian Museum with the golden death mask of Tutankhamen – a symbol of Egypt's mighty past – buried deep into its halls; these are the stage props of the Republic of Tahrir.

Week three – day sixteen – lacks the romance and the promise of the Day of Rage and the great battles against the Egyptian Ministry of Interior goons and the moment, just over a week ago, when the army refused Mubarak's orders to crush, quite literally, the people in the square. Will there be a week six or a day 32? Will the cameras still be there? Will the people? Will we? Yesterday proved our predictions wrong again. But they will have to remember that the iron fingernails of this regime have long ago grown into the sand, deeper than the pyramids, more powerful than ideology. We have not seen the last of this particular creature. Nor of its vengeance.

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America an enemy of democracy Al Jazeera,8 Feb. 2011,

As the Egyptian uprising enters its third week, many are wondering just who exactly will come out on top in this battle for the Arab world's most populous nation.

This time last week, it seemed that the millions of pro-democracy protesters who took to Egypt's streets had delivered a knock-out

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punch to the autocratic, American-backed, military regime of Hosni Mubarak.

One week on, however, and Mubarak remains in power.

How and why?

How is it possible for a president to withstand pressure from millions of people taking to the streets day in day out for 14 consecutive days? How has Mubarak been able to absorb widespread criticism for the murder of more than 300 innocent civilians and the injuring of thousands? How has this president been able to divert attention from the billions of dollars he and his family have stolen whilst millions of Egyptians continue to live in poverty? Why is it that the "international community" continues to do business with an Egyptian regime which has killed its citizens, attacked journalists, trampled on practically every single human right; and above all never contested a free election?

The simple answer to all these questions - The United States of America.

"Conspiracy conspiracy, blame it on the Americans" I hear you moan!

Allow me to pose to you the following questions (and answers).

Who has ruled Egypt since 1952? The military.

Who is the largest receiver of US military aid after Israel? Egypt.Who is the one person who must sign off on all military contracts in Egypt, giving him a "share" (kickback) from all deals? Hosni Mubarak.

What are the two most influential lobbies in Washington? The Israeli lobby and the arms manufacturing/military lobbies.

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Of Israel's four "neighbours" (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt) who possesses the largest military? Egypt.

What is the only court case in Egyptian history to be lost by the government at every level yet overturned by Presidential decree? An attempted juncture to prevent the sale of gas to Israel.

What is the name of the largest opposition party in Egypt? The Muslim Brotherhood.

Does it recognise Israel? No.Did it approve of Egyptian waterways being used to transfer US war ships during the illegal war on Iraq? No.

Let’s leave that chain of questions now on the side, bearing in mind that I am by no means insinuating that the Muslim Brotherhood are the only opposition force in Egypt or that they even constitute anywhere near a majority.

Egyptian voicesDuring this uprising I have travelled across the country. In Suez I met socialists who likened their uprising against the regime to the 1973 battle against Israeli forces lead by Ariel Sharon.

In Cairo I met journalists who protested because of decade’s worth of state censorship which prevented them from criticising Cairo's degrading relationship with Washington.

In Alexandria I met students furious that their country's role had become almost insignificant in the region because it no longer had the respect it once had.

All of these people, and many of the hundreds more whom I spoke to would always make reference to either the US or Israel in their criticism of Mubarak and his regime.

Yes it is the unemployment, the poverty, the police brutality, the lack of freedom, the poor education system and the economy that

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forced these millions of Egyptians out onto the street; but there is an underlying cause behind most of these problems. The Egyptians who destroyed a decades old barrier of fear, defeated one of the most oppressive police forces and challenged a world that thought they didn't have it in them to speak out - these Egyptians, are some of the most politically astute people I have met.

They understand that in order for Israel to exist there was no room for any of its neighbours to be strong (economically or militarily), they are aware that in order for the US to maintain its hegemony in the Middle East there can be no regional power but Israel, they still remember the days of Nasser and how he made Western leaders shudder, they recall the early stages of the 1973 war when Egypt's true military potential was almost realised.

The simple fact of the matter is, the US is trying to maintain this unjust (in)"balance of power" in the Arab world because despite all the talk from Obama, it still views this region through the same racist, colonialist eyes it always has. That is why it brought in Omar Suleiman, Egypt's vice president, that is why it is desperately seeking a younger pro-American/Israeli replacement to Mubarak, and that is why it's criticism of Mubarak's response to this uprising has been a pat on the back in comparison to the sentiments expressed during anti-government protests in Iran just a year ago.

It is unfortunate that the Egyptian army, which has been presented with a golden opportunity to regain its dignity and liberate the people by standing shoulder to shoulder with the pro-democracy protesters, has failed to do so. In fact, if this uprising fails to blossom into a revolution, it will be the Egyptian military's fault as much as it is Washington's, if not more.

The Arab people are no longer the ignorant, docile, apolitical, fearful consumer junkies they once were. The revolution in Tunisia, and the celebration of democracy manifested through the

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Egyptian uprising are just the beginning; the days of Western backed puppet despots in the Middle East are numbered. And the sooner Washington realises that the better. Because it is in America's interest to revise its policies vis-a-vis the Arab world, making them in tune with the Arab street rather than at the beck and call of Tel Aviv. And that means severing ties with the Mubarak regime and attempting to build a genuine relationship with the free Egyptian people.

But then again maybe the US could do with a lesson in democracy from the Egyptian people, for after all, the free people of Egypt, like their comrades in Tunisia, have and are bringing about regime change without the help of "the international community" or the "free world".

In fact they're doing so in spite of the "free world's" best efforts.

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Humility on the Nile Egypt's revolution to win or loseGeorge F. WillWashington Post,Wednesday, February 9, 2011;

Sixty years ago, American politics was embittered by an accusation couched as a question: "Who lost China?" The implied indictment was that America had fumbled away a possession through incompetence or sinister conniving.

In 1949, when communists came to power there, America bestrode both hemispheres shattered from war. Americans thought that their nation was at the wheel of the world and that whatever happened, wherever, happened at America's instigation, or at least its sufferance, or was evidence of American negligence.

It is a sign of national maturity - the product of hard learning, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan - that fewer American

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complainers are today faulting the Obama administration for not anticipating and shaping events in Egypt. Israel, which lives next door to Egypt and has an excellent intelligence service, did not see this coming. So, a modest proposal:

Those Americans who know which Republican will win next year's Iowa caucuses can complain about those who did not know that when a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire, he would set a region afire. From all other Americans, forbearance would be seemly.

It also would be amazing, because there is a cottage industry of Barack Obama critics who, not content with monitoring his myriad mistakes in domestic policies, insist that there must be a seamless connection of those with his foreign policy. Strangely, these critics, who correctly doubt the propriety and capacity of the U.S. government controlling our complex society, simultaneously fault the government for not having vast competence to shape the destinies of other societies. Such critics persist because, as Upton Sinclair wrote in 1935, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

America has one source of leverage over Egyptian events - the close relations between that nation's military leadership and America's, including the material dependence of the former on U.S. assistance. But saying that Egypt's military is the nation's most impressive institution constitutes faint praise. Can Egypt's soldiers fine-tune a whirlwind? It is largely forgotten that when Mikhail Gorbachev began contemplating reform of the Soviet Union - before things spun out of control, as they have a way of doing - he imagined only a more efficient communism still administered by a one-party state. Today, residual sentimentality about him obscures the fact that real multiparty pluralism was not in his original plans. And two decades later, it still is not in Russia's foreseeable future.

If there are Egyptian elections soon, America will be tempted to try to influence them. It did that successfully in Italy in 1948,

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when there was a substantial danger that communists would win. In Italy then, however, unlike in Egypt today, there were two clear sides - the Cold War was taking shape. And there was a more recent and robust parliamentary tradition, including political parties, than in Egypt.

In the National Endowment for Democracy and elsewhere, the U.S. government has access to reservoirs of talent for helping Egypt improvise an infrastructure of representative government. But this must be done with exquisite delicacy because, happily, the Egyptian regime is being shaken primarily by nationalists.

An encouraging aspect of the Egyptian protests is the widespread waving of the nation's flag. Western intellectuals, who tend toward cosmopolitanism, tend to disdain the nation-state and nationalism as aspects of humanity's infancy, things to be outgrown. But the nation gives substance and structure to the secular pride and yearnings of the Egyptian people, who are demographically young but culturally ancient. Indelicate American assistance for democratization could cause a recoil from those crowds eager to be proud of an Egyptian outcome.

The question is: What comes after whatever comes next? In March 2003, as U.S. forces fought toward Baghdad, a then-two-star general, David Petraeus, speaking to The Post's Rick Atkinson, "hooked his thumbs into his flak vest" and spoke five words that have reverberated ever since: "Tell me how this ends."

Next, Petraeus said five unremembered words: "Eight years and eight divisions?" Atkinson explained: "The allusion was to advice supposedly given the White House in the early 1950s by a senior Army strategist upon being asked what it would take to prop up French forces in South Vietnam."

We still do not know how the process begun by America's intervention in Iraq will end - or, for that matter, how to mark the "end" of a great historical convulsion. In Egypt, Egyptians will tell us how it ends.

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Allies Press U.S. to Go Slow on Egypt By MARK LANDLER and HELENE COOPERNYTIMES,8 Feb. 2011,

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration gropes for the right response to the uprising in Egypt, it has not lacked for advice from democracy advocates, academics, pundits, even members of the previous administration. But few voices have been as urgent, insistent or persuasive as those of Egypt’s neighbors.

Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have each repeatedly pressed the United States not to cut loose Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, too hastily, or to throw its weight behind the democracy movement in a way that could further destabilize the region, diplomats say. One Middle Eastern envoy said that on a single day, he spent 12 hours on the phone with American officials.

There is evidence that the pressure has paid off. On Saturday, just days after suggesting that it wanted immediate change, the administration said it would support an “orderly transition” managed by Vice President Omar Suleiman. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Mr. Mubarak’s immediate resignation might complicate, rather than clear, Egypt’s path to democracy, given the requirements of Egypt’s Constitution.

“Everyone is taking a little breath,” said a diplomat from the region, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing private conversations. “There’s a sense that we’re getting our message through.”

While each country has its own concerns, all worry that a sudden, chaotic change in Egypt would destabilize the region or, in the Arab nations, even jeopardize their own leaders, many of whom are also autocrats facing restive populations.

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Middle East allies are only one of several constituencies the administration needs to reckon with as it responds to the turmoil in Egypt. And they are less central to its calculations than either the Egyptian government or the demonstrators — opposing forces the United States has been struggling to balance.

Yet the allies cannot be ignored, officials said, since they, too, are vital to the United States, whether as suppliers of oil, like Saudi Arabia, or as partners with political influence in Washington, like Israel.

“I understand the concerns of everybody in the region,” Mrs. Clinton said Sunday. She said that she had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan and that President Obama had made calls to other leaders. State Department officials, she said, were constantly speaking with their counterparts in the region.

Administration officials said the tense mood in many of these countries had eased in recent days, as the United States has embraced a transition process in Egypt that does not demand Mr. Mubarak’s immediate departure.

Still, on Tuesday, the administration stiffened its public message to Mr. Suleiman, with the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, saying that the Egyptian vice president “made some particularly unhelpful comments about Egypt not being ready for democracy, about not seeing a lift of the emergency law.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. conveyed that message in a call to Mr. Suleiman, the White House said, urging him to take specific steps toward democracy. The strong language from Mr. Gibbs followed some criticism of the administration from Egyptian protesters and their foreign supporters that its public statements had been contradictory and equivocal.

On Monday, a diverse group of American specialists on Egypt and the Middle East wrote to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton expressing

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concern that the United States “may acquiesce to an inadequate and possibly fraudulent transitional process in Egypt.”

On Wednesday, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, is to meet with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in Washington. The meeting, which Israeli officials said came at Mr. Barak’s request, will be the first face-to-face contact between top Israeli and American officials since the Egyptian uprising began.

Israeli officials, who have long viewed Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman as stabilizing influences in a dangerous region, have made clear to the administration that they support evolution rather than revolution in Egypt. They believe it is important to make changes within the system rather than change the system first and hope stability can be maintained, a senior Israeli official said.

Mr. Suleiman is a longstanding Egyptian contact for the Israelis, and as a 2008 cable made public by WikiLeaks showed, he has been the Israeli government’s preferred successor to Mr. Mubarak for several years.

“There is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect” of Mr. Suleiman as the successor, the cable from Tel Aviv reported.

Arab leaders have similar concerns. Speaking to Mr. Obama on Sunday, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, the Emirates’ defense chief, emphasized the need for “stability” in Egypt, according to a statement put out by the United Arab Emirates after the call. The crown prince “also stressed the necessity that the period of transition in Egypt should be smooth and organized through the framework of national institutions,” it said. Mr. Obama also spoke last week with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

The Arab leaders all had the same message for the United States, several Arab officials said. They thought Mr. Obama went too far

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last Tuesday when he said that Mr. Mubarak needed to begin the transition in Egypt “now” — followed a day later by Mr. Gibbs’s declaration that “now means yesterday.”

“We have been adamant that forcing Mubarak out risks instability,” said one Arab official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing private exchanges. In conversations with the Obama administration, Arab officials have raised the specter of the Muslim Brotherhood, which some say has begun to hijack the protests that began among largely secular young people in Egypt adept at using Facebook and Twitter.

One Arab diplomat likened the democracy movement to a train fueled by university students and human rights advocates.

“Eventually, those students will have to get off that train and go back to school, and the human rights people will have to go back to work, and you know who will be on the train when it finally rolls into the station?” the diplomat asked. “The Muslim Brotherhood.”

Mrs. Clinton said the best way for Arab countries to protect themselves was to begin addressing the grievances of their people. Noting that she warned about the need for reform in the Arab world in Qatar last month, she said, “I could not have been clearer about our concerns for all of these governments.”

Israel, despite its deep anxiety about Egypt, has generally heeded the requests of administration officials not to inject itself into the debate. “Israel has been very wise to be low-key,” Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview on Tuesday.

Mr. Kerry, who has also talked to Arab leaders, said the crisis in Egypt had caused American allies to question “what sort of longevity there is to the notion of alliances.” But, he added, “they have to understand: this is not us making some kind of decision; this is the people of Egypt making a decision.”

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Editorial: Mr. Suleiman’s Empty Promises NYTIMES,8 Feb. 2011,

We are a long way from knowing how Egypt will turn out. The government is using all of its power — including a promised 15 percent raise for federal workers — to try to hang on. The opposition is courageously pushing back, and, on Tuesday, it drew thousands of supporters to Liberation Square.

The United States and the European Union may not have been able to wheedle or push President Hosni Mubarak from power. Still, they badly miscalculated when they endorsed Egypt’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, to lead the transition to democracy.

Mr. Suleiman may talk sweetly to Washington and Brussels. But he appears far more interested in maintaining as much of the old repressive order as he can get away with. That is unacceptable to Egypt’s people, and it should be unacceptable to Egypt’s Western supporters.

President Obama said the right things last week when he demanded that democratic change in Egypt start “now.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent statements that change would “take some time” have taken the pressure off. Mr. Obama needs to regain his voice and press Mr. Suleiman to either begin a serious process of reform or get out of the way.

The protesters have won some important concessions. They forced Mr. Mubarak to forsake re-election. Mr. Mubarak’s son and Mr. Suleiman, a former intelligence chief, also will not run. On Saturday, the government opened a dialogue with the opposition — including the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood.

More reform was promised, but it has been hard to take that seriously after Mr. Mubarak gave himself the sole power to appoint a panel to recommend constitutional amendments.

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And while Mr. Suleiman was conciliatory in the early days of the protests, his recent public statements have been chilling. He said he does not believe it is time to lift the three-decade-old emergency law that has been used to suppress and imprison opposition leaders. Most alarming, he said the country’s “culture” is not yet ready for democracy.

Mr. Suleiman is not going to do what’s needed on his own. So the United States and its allies will have to lay down a clear list of steps that are the minimum for holding a credible vote this year and building a democracy.

The Egyptian government cannot choose which reforms to dole out when. Opposition leaders must participate in all aspects of the reform process. The emergency law must be lifted and Egyptians guaranteed freedom of speech and association. All detained protesters must be freed and the government-allied forces who viciously attacked demonstrators last week must be prosecuted.

The government and the opposition need to jointly set a date for elections and establish an independent commission to oversee the process. Egyptian and international monitors will need to observe the vote and the count. The government and opposition will need to work together to establish criteria for registering parties and candidates and ensure that all have access to the news media. Then the full debate over Egypt’s future can take place and the Egyptian people can decide.

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Open letter to President Obama as Egyptians herald a new dawn By Bikya Masr Staff,Bikya Masr (Egyptian newspaper)Feb 8th, 2011

Since 1953, when Iran’s democratic movement was suppressed and the Shah restored to power, the United States has often aligned itself

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with repressive autocrats in the Middle East. The current uprising in Egypt presents a test of America’s commitments as consequential as the Iranian crisis fifty-eight years ago. Therefore we, the undersigned, academics and researchers in the fields of Middle East Studies and US Foreign Policy, and U.S. citizens, call upon you to use all the powers of your office to stand unequivocally behind the January 25th Movement, withdraw US support from Hosni Mubarak’s security state, and establish 2011 as a watershed in US relations with the peoples of the Middle East. You have rightly recognized: “The Egyptian people want freedom, they want free and fair elections, they want a representative government, they want a responsible government.” These basic rights cannot be achieved without moving to replace the current regime, and the transition process must include real representation, including youth, from the pro-democracy movement.

You also correctly noted that “it is not the role of any other country to determine Egypt’s leaders. Only the Egyptian people can do that.” But Egyptians’ right to self-government has been obstructed for thirty years by a military and intelligence apparatus that is trained and funded by Washington, fiercely loyal to Mubarak, and inimical to popular sovereignty. Vice president Omar Suleiman, widely known as Cairo’s renditions czar, provides a constant reminder of American complicity in Egyptian repression — as do the F-16s cracking sonic booms above Tahrir Square and the tanks that stood passively while Mubarak’s goons roamed freely. There is no need to intervene in or instruct the January 25th Movement, which has bravely shown the world what real democracy looks like. It is imperative, though, that your administration rescind support from all Egyptian forces opposing democracy and civilian control.

The demonstrators have called for democratic regime change, not a US-facilitated transition to another despot. We urge you to help ensure that their demands are met, their rights are honored, and the Egyptian government ceases its attacks on journalists and peaceful protestors.

Sincerely,The Undersigned (388 signiture)

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Our revolution In Israel, it's not the masses who will rise up against the regime, but the opposite; the government will shake off the checks and balances restraining its power. By Aluf Benn Haaretz,8 Feb. 2011

The Israeli revolution won't take place in town squares, but in the corridors of power. It won't erupt over increases in the price of fuel and bread, but over fears of anarchy and a loss of governance. It's not the masses who will rise up against the regime, but the opposite. It's government that will shake off the checks and balances restraining its power.

The systems fault that was revealed over the appointment of the Israel Defense Forces' chief of staff threatens to shake the foundations of the Israeli republic. This can be seen in the failure of leadership and proper functioning shown by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak; the undermining of political control in the army; and the intervention by the High Court of Justice, the state comptroller and the attorney general to determine who would be the next chief of staff and who would quit in frustration. It all prompted a public counterreaction.

The calls for strengthening government and the end of rule by jurists and the media have been growing. Instead of the slogan "corrupt ones, you have become repulsive," we'll get the slogan "purists, you've gone too far."

The loss of faith in our elected leaders has been compounded by concerns over the increased external threats if the Mubarak regime collapses and Egypt becomes an Iranian clone. The fear is growing but the country's leaders are having problems projecting authority and a sense of security. In our Bible classes, we all studied the political commentary regarding the Book of Judges. "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes," the Bible says. When that feeling becomes fixed in the public consciousness, the road to a

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remedy in the form a "strongman" who will put things right at home and smite our enemies abroad, like the judges and kings of old, gets shorter.

In the Israel of 2011, unlike biblical times, you don't need to look for the strongman hiding behind the she-asses. He's waiting at the foreign minister's office for his turn. More than any other politician, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman constantly advocates the establishment of a presidential system of government. That's his "truth," his solution to heal the ills of the current political system.

Lieberman's bills in the last Knesset to provide for a separation of powers and a presidential form of government were sloppily drafted but easy to understand. The prime minister would become the country's executive branch. He would appoint "professional" ministers and have oversight over the IDF. Balance would be achieved through mutual deterrence: The prime minister would be able to dissolve the Knesset if a parliamentary majority opposed his policy, and the Knesset, with 80 votes, would be able to dismiss him. Lieberman is promising a stable government of technocrats that would not be dependent on a coalition. His system wouldn't have superfluous ministers without portfolio or deputy ministers like that of Netanyahu's government.

The more the government's authority is undermined and Netanyahu is perceived as an ineffective weakling, the more the public will be captivated by Lieberman's ideas. This is particularly so if he tempts them with provisions like eliminating the right to petition the High Court of Justice, curtailing the state comptroller's authority and limiting freedom of the press. In his presidential system of government, the prime minister would appoint an IDF chief of staff of his own way of thinking. Grumbling neighbors, nosy journalists and badgering lawyers would not be able to interfere.

The parliamentary system is prone to crises and is hard to navigate, but it has two positive attributes. It limits the prime

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minister's power and ensures representation of rival camps in Israeli society. In a presidential form of government, the winner takes all. Losing votes go to waste and minorities are not represented in the government.

Such a system suits the Israeli right wing, which advocates government by the majority and subjugation of the Arab community and the "old elites." Netanyahu has ridden this wave in the past. In the current Knesset, Lieberman inherited it as leader of the right and the leading nationalist legislative force, while Likud trails behind.

Lieberman didn't interfere in the crisis over the chief of staff's appointment, and while he still awaits a decision over whether he will be indicted, he is quietly enjoying the erosion of his rivals' public standing: the prime minister, the defense minister and the judicial system. Just a few more controversies at the top and the calls to "let them run the country" will be translated into longing for a change in the system of government and installing a strong leader at the top.

Crisis situations such as the current one are prone to such turnabouts. The so-called stinking maneuver of 1990 that caused revulsion toward the political system gave rise to the direct election of the prime minister, which was later repealed. The foiling of Yoav Galant's appointment as chief of staff and the expected revelations in the Boaz Harpaz forgery case in the chief of staff's office could spark the next constitutional change.

Crazy? If we had been told a month ago that millions of Egyptians would take to the streets and demand the expulsion of President Hosni Mubarak, would we have believed it?

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HOME PAGEReturn to negotiations now As the ring of isolation around us grows tighter, we must not forget our closest neighbor, with whom we have no peace. By SMADAR PERRY Jerusalem Post,02/08/2011

This moment, when the uprising in Egypt projects out to streets and rulers’ palaces throughout the Arab world, and the contagious demonstrations could spring up at any moment in another country, this is precisely the right time to return to the negotiating table with the Palestinians.

Yes, we have shown maturity and political loyalty to President Hosni Mubarak. We’ve also not missed an opportunity to explain how volatile and worrisome the situation is. But this is not enough. As the ring of isolation around us grows tighter, we must not forget our closest neighbor, with whom we have no peace process.

In the near future, the government in Egypt will be busy with internal affairs. Whoever emerges as the new leader must first stabilize his rule, learn the lessons and rebuild governing institutions. Egypt played a significant role in our negotiations with the Palestinians, even though we were not always content with its position.

We also managed to reach unprecedented strategic understandings with the Egyptians in dealing with Gaza-related security issues. We must now assume that the Egyptian role in the process will fade, at least until summer.

Events in Egypt prove, not for the first time, that the US administration does not understand our region, and that its actions could catch us by surprise. It is precisely in such a situation that we must not sit back and do nothing. No one will do the job for us; we must not rely on allies to come to our aid, and must not assume

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that time is on our side. Under the new circumstances, the status quo – that is, a stagnant peace process – is particularly dangerous.

I HAVE little praise for the American role in the Egyptian turmoil – the same country that mediates between us and the Palestinians. It has acted crudely. I’m shocked by Washington’s public stance, with the president and secretary of state presiding over an anti-Mubarak agenda almost as bad as Al-Jazeera’s. They seem to want to remove Mubarak, replace him with his new vice president, Omar Suleiman, and dictate conditions relating to democracy and human rights – all while ignoring the code of tradition in our part of the world.

While the region’s dictatorial regimes must, of course, be criticized, Washington’s behavior is worrisome. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton look like elementary school teachers disciplining the naughty pupil Mubarak. They don’t care if they’re leading 85 million Egyptians toward chaos. They’re not thinking about the domino effect in countries where the young generation has the same reasons to take to the streets. Kick Zine El Abidine Ben Ali out of Tunis and Mubarak out of Cairo, and don’t give any thought to how things will look afterward: unemployment, street violence, Islamists seizing power, huge status gaps, a deep economic crisis – and all this without a reasonable plan for the future.We must not underestimate the role played behind the scenes by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

It has branches in every Arab country, including the Palestinian Authority. Suppose, for example, that we continue to do nothing regarding peace with the Palestinians. Suppose we continue to evade. The next phase is already at our doorstep: The Islamist movement is gaining strength, leveraging the slap on the face that the US administration has delivered to Mubarak and his supporters.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is also concerned about this course of events. The streets of West Bank

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cities are liable to fill with more angry demonstrators – their young generation is no less frustrated than in Egypt – with Islamists conniving to drive the demonstrations out of control.

Israel must take the initiative immediately. It should seize the moment and renew talks with the PA. It should be determined to send the message that it is serious about moving forward rather than looking for excuses to blame the other side. I suggest we be not only strong, but smart, realistic and generous. Let’s get to work. This is our opportunity to engage the Palestinians.

Whoever thinks the problem will just disappear if we continue postponing negotiations is delusional.

We are here, they are here, and the conflict hovers over our heads. The more we dodge and postpone, the more liable we are to be taken by surprise. And no one promises us happy surprises.

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Daily Telegraph: 'Aleppo, Syria: hotels, restaurants and packages'..

Haaretz: 'Israel spending extra $1.5m a day after Egypt gas line explosion'..

Haaretz: 'IDF spokesman visited U.K. incognito for fear of targeting by pro-Palestinian protesters'..

Haaretz: 'Settlers in Hebron receive Spanish FM with calls of 'Nazi, anti-Semite''..

Jerusalem Post: 'Gulf leaders hear rumblings of dissent'..

Guardian: 'WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices'..

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Guardian: 'Egypt's landless have no love for Mubarak'..

Daily Telegraph: 'French PM enjoyed free holiday courtesy of Mubarak'..

Daily Telegraph: 'government claims it has a timetable for transferring power'..

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